Winning Against Violent Environments
Winning Against Violent Environments
Students can do more than learn about techniques of conflict management; they themselves can become agents of change by taking those skills into their communities. Young people are empowered by providing them with skills such as effective decisionmaking, communication, and problem solving, and encouraging them to use them in their daily lives, providing assistance to others.
The Winning Against Violent Environments Program (WAVE) in the Cleveland Municipal School District not only subscribes to this philosophy, but implements it through its conflict management advisors in Cleveland's public schools. The program, run out of Martin Luther King Jr. Law and Municipal Careers High School in Cleveland, is located in Hough, one of the city's toughest neighborhoods. This program began in 1983 and is the oldest school-based conflict resolution program in Ohio, and one of the oldest in the United States.
WAVE students and an adult coordinator train other students and adults as conflict managers and mediators. The two main conflict resolution processes taught by WAVE trainers are a formal mediation model for students and adults in middle school and high school (grades six through twelve), and a less formal process for use on the playground, cafeteria, or in the classroom. Under an additional "student trainer" model, the students teach the lessons and lead the training activities, thus involving urban youth as positive agents of change in their schools and communities.
While in the beginning WAVE focused strictly on peer mediation, it has now adopted a more comprehensive approach where, for example, the program advisors teach lessons across subject areas to all of their students, giving in-service training to their fellow educators on the skills of conflict management. They also conduct school- and community-wide activities such as peace walks in the neighborhood, working with student conflict managers to raise money to provide food baskets for needy families, and holding peace assemblies for parents, students, and staff. WAVE has "trained thousands of students grades K-12, provided professional development to teachers, led parent meetings and training sessions, conducted faculty and staff in-service programs, developed the grades K-2 training model, and facilitated public meetings of young people and adults." (Close and Lechman 1997).
WAVE still includes peer mediation as a component of many of the schools' conflict management programs. During the 2003-2004 school year alone, student mediators in the district conducted more than nine thousand mediations. The benefits were revealed in an evaluation of the WAVE program by Kathy Bickmore, Ph.D., of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Her research showed "significant improvements in students understanding and capacity to positively deal with conflicts, improved student attitudes toward attending school, a reduction in suspensions for negative behaviors, and an improvement in academic achievement by those students who were trained in these important life skills" (July 2000).
The WAVE program has been a school conflict management catalyst for other districts. WAVE training, combined with a state-sponsored grant training program, led to the development of a district-wide school conflict management program in Pioneer, Ohio.
